Whether we deserve it or not, we have been granted a stay of execution. Barack Obama had promised to fundamentally transform America. If Hillary Clinton had won the election, the deed would have been all but done.

We would have lost the Supreme Court for at least a generation. Political correctness would have been fully sanctioned, the military fully sissified, and the economy put largely under the government’s thumb.

Happily, that has not happened. Why it did not happen will have political scientists scratching their heads for years to come. The stars seemed so perfectly aligned to elect Hillary Clinton.

For starters, the denizens of the four major power centers in America--New York, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood—voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton and donated accordingly.

In Manhattan, the seat of the publishing, advertising, and fashion industries, Donald Trump managed 10 percent of the vote to Hillary’s 87 percent. In Brooklyn, the only other power center in New York City, Trump received 18 percent of the vote.

New York, by the way, is also home to Wall Street, Broadway, the New York Times, and almost all the major broadcast networks.

In Washington D.C., the seat of the federal government and the power center for labor, the political media, and the educational establishment, Hillary got 93 percent of the vote to Trump’s 4 percent. In the District’s western wards, where the media and government elite tend to live, Hillary got a frightening 96 percent of the vote.

The surrounding counties pushed both Virginia and Maryland into the blue column. Hillary received 75 percent of the vote in affluent Montgomery County, Maryland, 89 percent in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and 77 percent in Arlington County, Virginia.

In Los Angeles County, Hillary beat Trump 71 percent to 23 percent, but in those hip precincts in which film industry apparatchiks cluster, Hillary was winning as much as 90 percent of the vote and nowhere less than 75.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, people in the entertainment industry contributed $22 million to Hillary’s campaign and to pro-Clinton super-PACs compared to less than $290,000 for Trump. That is roughly a 98 to 1 ratio.

In none of the four counties of greater Silicon Valley, where the creators and managers of America’s social media cluster, did Trump receive more than 20 percent of the vote. In San Francisco, Hillary won by a 9 to 1 margin.

According to NBC News, Hillary received $60 for every $1 Trump received from employees at the world's largest technology companies.

Although much of the NEA money is hard to track, the following independent expenditures for 2016 tell us just about all we need to know: “For Democrats: $1,859,012; Against Democrats: $0; For Republicans: $268; Against Republicans: $3,602,036.”

America’s professors pushed and shamed their students more openly and aggressively to the left than did our public school teachers, even in the reddest of states.

In Kansas, for instance, a state that Trump carried by more than twenty points, Hillary carried Douglas County, the home of the University of Kansas and a proud colonial outpost of the larger progressive imperium, by a 2-1 margin.

In Indiana, another state that Trump won by 20 points, Hillary carried Monroe County, the home of the University of Indiana, by 24 points.

A survey by the Washington Times of America’s leading liberal arts professors found that 99 percent of their donations went to Democratic presidential candidates in 2016. No surprise here.

In sum, the people who control virtually everything we see, read, hear, and learn conspired, wittingly or otherwise, to shove Obama’s fundamental transformation down America’s throat.

Given this control, there had to be many a Pauline Kael moment post-election. Kael, a New Yorker film critic, reportedly said after Richard Nixon’s landslide 1972 victory, “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”

Kael’s actual quote is both more damning and more enlightening. “I live in a rather special world,” wrote Kael. “I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken.”

By 2016, the left had transformed those outside of the New Yorker “ken” into Hillary’s “basket of deplorables.”

When Hillary made this pre-scripted slur at an LGBT for Hillary Gala in New York City, the audience laughed and cheered. So much for love trumping hate.

Two months later, Hillary’s New York supporters had nothing to cheer about so they took to lecturing VP Elect Mike Pence about the anxieties of their “rather special world.”

“We, sir, we are the diverse America,” said the actor playing Aaron Burr in “Hamilton” on Broadway, “who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us--our planet, our children, our parents--or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir.”

Did it not dawn on this actor that every member of his “diverse America,” certainly every member of the cast, was expected to think and vote exactly alike?

Think and vote alike our power elites did. For the past year, they conspired to use their money, their influence, and their power to bend the ‘irredeemable” half of America to their collective will.

They hectored, they lectured, they threatened, they shamed, but the one thing they neglected to do was pray.

I am still not exactly sure how they lost, but I thank God for it. Happy Thanksgiving.